


Run Together

by Masu_Trout



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 15:11:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12111429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Tifa doesn't owe this woman anything. They're nothing more than a pair of strangers unlucky enough to be trapped together. And yet—she wants to help.(Aerith and Tifa meet during a raid on Midgar. Things change.)





	Run Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hokuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/gifts).



Tifa first runs into the stranger going at a solid sprint; she has just enough time to register the flash of bright clothing against Midgar's gloomy grey as she turns around a corner before she slams into someone and sends the both of them tumbling to the ground in a pile of limbs and pain.

“What?” the strange woman chokes out. Long hair, bright pink clothes and a woven basket to match, carved wooden staff as her only immediately-obvious method of self-defense— _a tourist_ , Tifa thinks with a sudden sinking dread. 

Still, she's not a monster. She scrambles back onto two feet, wincing as her scraped knees make themselves known, and holds a hand out to help the woman up. “A protest up near the inner rim of Sector Six went massive. Shinra's heading in. They're going to shut the whole thing down.” And hold anyone they damn well please for as long as they damn well please, doing whatever they damn well please to them. Tifa doesn't say that part—if this woman's got any experience at all with Midgar's underbelly, she won't need it spelled out.

To her credit, the woman doesn't wait a moment. She's on her feet in a flash; she picks her staff up and slings it back over her shoulder, then—still holding Tifa's hand—start pulling them both deeper into the back alley. 

(For a moment, Tifa wonders if she might be a Shinra plant, but that hardly makes sense. A Turk wouldn't have let a potential hostile knock her to the ground.)

“Mom is going to be _so mad_ ,” the woman mutters, then glances Tifa's way. “I hardly know Sector Six at all,” she says half-apologetically, “do you know if there's any way back to Five that's still good?”

There's a few, but they're all beyond risky even at the best of times, and letting on that she knows them would dump a whole bunch of suspicion onto her head if the woman gets caught trying. 

“Sorry. There's a few routes my bar uses”—alcohol smuggling is a matter of tradition in Midgar, what with to the city's nightmarish tax rate. It hardly counts as illegal at all—“but I'm sure those streets are crawling with patrols.”

Half an hour ago she cracked a chunk of rebar over a SOLDIER's head. If they're not swarming the Sector already, they will be soon.

The expression that crosses the stranger's face is close to heartbreaking; fear and despair war for dominance before she pushes all of them down and summons up a bright smile. “Okay, then. I… hm. I don't suppose you know of a decent street corner to spend the night, then?”

Sector Six is a popular location for upper city folks who want to feel like they're slumming it for a day, and as such it's both safer and more sanitized than either of its neighbors. The streets are clean-ish and bordered by small houses, pubs with proper bouncers on staff, and brothels that pay protection money to the Turks. Most nights here, you can fall asleep in the gutter and wake up with your throat un-slit and your wallet emptied but intact.

Tonight will be different. The doors will be boarded, the windows shut tight. No hotel or shelter will be taking guests now. It's no kind of place for someone all alone, and… 

Tifa's gotten good at hardening her heart. Nibelheim tore the mercy right out of her, and her time spent in Midgar's done an excellent job of digging out all the pesky little leftover scraps she didn't quite manage to excise. She's got her bar, and Barret and Marlene, and Jesse and Wedge and Biggs—it's a small circle, but that's what she needs. Widening it any further would be beyond dangerous.

And _yet_. 

She wants to help this woman. Maybe it's her smile, or her carefully-braided hair, or the way she hasn't yet gotten angry over her situation. Maybe it's just that they're two strangers sharing the same miserable alley on the same miserable night. Either way, something possesses Tifa to clutch tighter around the woman's hand and say, “follow me. I know a place.”

It sounds like the kind of offer a serial killer might make. Tifa expects the woman to balk. Instead, she looks Tifa in the eyes for a long moment. “What's your name?”

“It's, ah—Tifa.” The moment she says it, she tries to bite down on the word. It would have been smarter to lie.

The stranger nods. “Nice to meet you, Tifa! I'm Aerith.”

Tifa's bafflement must be showing on her face, because Aerith grins at her. “Now we're not strangers anymore, right? So it's fine if I go with you. Lead the way.”

She's picked up a real odd duck, Tifa thinks, but the confirmation's all she needs. Carefully, her hand still wrapped tight around Aerith's, she tugs them both toward the mouth of the alley.

All clear. Shinra's dogs haven't made it this far yet. 

“Come on,” she says, and pulls them out into the street.

–

Aerith keeps a surprisingly good pace. More than that, she's surprisingly good at talking a mile a minute even while they're both bolting down the darkened streets in a flat-out sprint.

“So,” she asks, half-winded, “where are we headed?” 

Tifa shoots her an incredulous look, makes a shushing gesture, and then points with her free hand towards the gloomy alcoves where Shinra recording devices might well lurk.

“Oh, no, don't worry about those. They turn the cameras off when a sector goes into lockdown. You can't build a brutality case when there's no evidence to be found, right?”

“Seriously?” Tifa pants out. She pauses at a crossroad, weighing her options—and then somehimg occurs to her. “Wait, how do _you_ know that?” 

Aerih at least has the sense to look sheepish. “I may, have, uh… dated a guy from Shinra a while back? Not for long!” she adds at Tifa's incredulous look.“He was cute, but then he told me had to go off on some mission and just up and ghosted me. My mom never liked him anyway, so…” She shrugs. “But he always had the best Shinira gossip. I learned a lot from him.”

It's either the worst fucking lie Tifa has ever heard in her entire life—and she hangs around drunks for a living—or it's the absolute truth. She can't decide which option is less absurd. She tries to imagine Aerith dating some burly, meat-headed Shinra tough and fails utterly, then tries to imagine her as a Turk spy thinking that story might possibly pass muster and fails once more. 

Finally, she shrugs, pulls a spare dishrag off her belt loops and ties it around her chin, and peers once more into the darkness. No red lights, no noise of impending truths. Barret's going to have an aneurysm over this little stunt of hers either way—might as well risk a little.

“You have one of those I can use, too?”

“I thought your boyfriend said—”

“ _Ex_ ,” Aerith says firmly, “and he also told me he'd bring me back a souvenir once his mission was done, so. Not a lot of trust going on right now.”

“Now you tell me that,” Tifa grumbles, but she pulls another rag free and hands it to Aerith. She's probably lying about something, but it truly doesn't seem like she's in with Shinra. So long as that much is true the rest of it isn't any of Tifa's business.

Together, they creep out into the open.

The silence is oppressive; no part of Midgar ever ought to be this barren, this empty. The grey and the gloom and the lifeless choking quiet remind her of— _ash coating her mouth with every gasping breath she takes, walls of searing heat and crumpled bodies trapped beneath piles of burning rubble every which way she turns, no one alive to hear her screaming_ —some sort of eerie ghost town or something.

She wishes she was still holding Aerith's hand.

Tifa knows this route well, at least; she's traveled it with the rest of the group a dozen times before. A left, a right—ducking away from the sound of what might be a rat or might be a Shinra patrol—and then finally a tight squeeze through a dingy alley that Shinra got halfway through bricking up and then forgot about entirely.

Aerith is quick and quiet, and she keeps a good pace. She moves like someone who knows the danger of being caught, like someone who's felt the noose tighten and the claws close in.

It's none of her business. They're basically strangers, and everyone in Midgar has a sob story. But Tifa can't help wondering what made her this way.

Patchy beams of light cut a swathe through the gloom of the alley, turning artificial night into gold-tinged dusk. There's a hole in the wall here, fifteen feet up and lazily boarded over and just big enough for a person to crawl through; through it, Tifa can here the sounds of drunken shouting. It's a mix of revelry and shock. The aftermath of a sector's closing, as felt through the noise of those who can no longer make it home tonight.

Sector Seven. Home.

She doesn't even realize she's stopped until Aerith steps closer and peers at her face. “I take it we made it? I can't even see your mouth and I can tell you're smiling.” 

“Oh,” Tifa says, “right.” She rips the rag off her face and holds out a hand for Aerith to give hers back.

Aerith unwraps her strip of cloth and drops it into Tifa's hand. After a moment's pause she adds, “huh. I was expecting someone…”

“Creepier?” Tifa asks. “Dirtier?”

“…Closer to the posters that people stick to the junk in Sector Five?” Aerith admits, and Tifa can't hold back a laugh. 

The old Shinra propaganda posters—featuring sloppy-drawn anti-Shinra protesters armed with torches and rebar and inhumanly grotesque scowls—have become something of an in-joke among Sector Five's citizens. Illicit reprints were going for a good five hundred gil on the black market last she heard. She's not sure who to blame for that one, but, much like most of what goes on around Wall Market, either Corneo or the Men's Hall folks are probably involved somehow. 

“Better than expected, then?” Tifa asks, and she poses a little, like a teenager showing off, because she's alive and she's free and she's giddy with the sounds of safety in front of her.

In fairness, Aerith's not exactly what she expected either. She'd seen the pink and the braid and the staff, even in the dark. Now she can see a beautiful white gemstone, pale and perfectly round like some strange materia, tied into her hair; the corded muscle in her arms, testament to the strength needed to use her weapon of choice; the dirt-stains on the knees of her dress that seem caked right into the fabric.

Aerith snorts, presses a hand to her mouth to hold back laughter, and Tifa is suddenly very glad she decided to take her along.

She could look a moment longer, or maybe two—but they need to get through the wall. No time for stupid jokes. She turns to Aerith, says, “hey, can you give me a boost?” and Aerith obligingly lets her climb onto her shoulders so she can pop loose the three key nails that send the whole mass of boards clattering to the ground.

Tifa slides through first, grabs at familiar handholds to keep her from toppling facefirst onto the concrete. Once she's all the way through and standing right-side-up once more, she climbs onto a nearby crate and pulls Aerith through. Aerith's hands are warm and calloused—worn from weapon use, Tifa's sure, she hadn't noticed that before—and her eyes are wide with delight as she takes in the scene unfolding at the mouth of the alley.

Sector Seven is always busy. Now, though, it's become a mess of sheer unrestrained chaos. One part spillover protest, one part worried people waiting for news, and one part gawkers looking for an excuse to drink. That latter group is only going to grow and grow as the night grows longer, and Tifa's going to help it along.

(She'd like to say it's the moral thing, another form of rebellion. Feed the peoples' courage, make them brave, help them remember what it means to want to fight. The truth, though, is this: she runs a bar. The fact that she also keeps a terrorist cell in her cellar doesn't exempt her from needing to turn a profit.)

Tifa pauses a moment to push the screws back into the wall's cover, then sets off in the direction of the Seventh Heaven. Aerith follows along at a steady clip, wide-eyed and with a smile to match. 

“There's so many people!” She spins in a little half-circle, looking all about her, then asks, “where are we going now?”

Tifa can't help but smile. It would be easy enough for Aerith to disappear into the crowd now, find someone to take her in who isn't quite obviously some sort of anti-Shinra rabble-rouser with an odds-on chance of dying or being _disappeared_ sometime in the next few months. And yet she wants to stay.

“You can come to my bar with me, if you'd like, stay until the sector borders open up again. I'm going to start mixing drinks to get angry drunks angrier. You can… help wash dishes, I suppose?”

“What, you don't need a bouncer?” Aerith mock-flexes one wiry arm, grinning wildly. “I'll have you know I was tutored by a Shinra _elite_.”

“I've got a bouncer, actually”—a bouncer who's going to kill her once she gets back, now that she thinks about it, because Barret has reason enough to be angry over the reckless shit she pulled today even without the added insult of her bringing a complete stranger back to base—“but he's mostly for show. I wouldn't have bought the place if I couldn't clear a crowd.”

They're heading straight into the mass of people now; it's not the fastest route back, but someone might still be looking for her and there's nothing better for anonymity than being surrounded by a thousand others.

She reaches a hand out, just in case Aerith wants a guide. It's easy to get lost in a crowd, after all.

Aerith takes hold and twines her fingers with Tifa's. 

“That's so cool,” she says, stepping a little closer so she doesn't get dragged behind, “owning your own place. I wish I could do something like that.”

It's a mess, this thick in the crowd. Personal space has clearly been abandoned as a concept and sobriety's likely next to go. Tifa tries to slide past a particularly drunk man, gives up, elbows him in the stomach, and squeezes herself and Aerith past while he's hunched over and gasping for breath.

“What do you do?” Tifa asks once they're past the worst of it. She figures it's a good time for the question, seeing as they're nearly on Seventh Heaven's doorstep now; she might still have half a chance to run if Aerith opens up her mouth and says _Turk_. 

Seventh Heaven's front isn't nearly as crowded as the entrances to the other bars around, mostly because it's not open without her to run it, but there's still a few dozen folks sitting on the steps or in the dirt nearby in hopes she might yet turn on the lights and throw open the doors.

Her bar is famous here, and for good reason. Something about being wanted for terroristic acts takes all the sting out of the threat of being fined for liquor-smuggling. Tifa has the _good_ booze.

“I'm a… freelancer, I guess? An _independent en-tre-preneur_.” She draws out the last word, putting on an exaggerated above-plate accent. After a moment, she adds, “I sell flowers.”

“Oh,” Tifa says, and then: “ _oh_ ,” because, here in Midgar where nothing ever grows, there can be no euphemism more obvious than _flower-seller_.

Aerith must catch the look on Tifa's face—one part startled and one part curious, because she leans in and smacks Tifa on the shoulder. “Not like that, weirdo! Actual flowers, I swear. Though I think a few of my customers might still be holding out hope.” With a start, she seems to remember the basket she's been clutching. She pulls open the handles and reaches down for something inside. “I really did drop a lot when you smacked into me, I hope nobody notices… anyway, here, this is for you! As a thank you.”

She reaches across Tifa's back, to the point where Tifa's hair is bunched into a tie, and fiddles with something for a moment. When she releases it, there's a cluster of slightly wilted violets hanging on her low ponytail.

For a moment, there's nothing Tifa can say; she brushes her fingers against the petals just to make sure they're real. Surely nothing this fragile can grow down in Midgar.

They're soft and lovely and living. She lets them go as soon as she realizes, half-afraid she might crush them. “Thank you,” Tifa says, trying to keep her voice steady. “They're great.”

Tifa wants to kiss her. It would be so easy to press her lips to Aerith's. But it's poor manners to go for someone you already offered a room to, especially when they've nowhere else to go, and anyway there's still the matter of her being a wanted criminal with a lifespan that's going to be measured in days if Shinra ever finds out just who she is. 

Instead she reaches for Aerith's hand again, pulls it to her so she can press a kiss to Aerith's knuckles. It's a little bit silly, maybe, like she's a little kid playing at being a knight, but Aerith goes pink and opens her hand to stroke one finger along Tifa's cheek and—it's nice. 

To say the least.

“So,” Aerith says. Her voice has gone a bit strangled, and she clears her throat before she starts again. “We should probably… get inside, right?” 

Tifa smiles. “Right,” she says, “of course.”

Barret's going to yell at her, she's about to be run ragged trying to keep everyone in the bar something close to halfway satisfied, she's going to have a near-stranger staying in her bar. She has a feeling it's going to be a very good night.

–

Tifa's half-right, in the end.

Aerith gets more and more wonderful the more she gets to talk to her. It's the best night Tifa's had since she left her hometown—or, at least, it is until half-past four in the morning, when Aerith, tipsy on Tifa's best beer, smiling and beautiful and lying on the floor next to the jukebox, lets slip the name of her jerk ex from Shinra. 

“Zack Fair,” she snorts, wrinkling her nose, and then, a little wistfully: “he wasn't half-bad at carpentry.”

Tifa isn't quite listening anymore. She can't hear anything over the sound of her blood rushing in her ears, over the echo of Aerith's voice on the name _Zack Fair_.

She never expected—

She'd always assumed—

She'd thought that part of her life would be _done_. Tifa bites down on her lip, hard, to hold back the wordless scream trying to rip its way out of her throat, and Aerith turns leans up onto one elbow. 

“Tifa?” she asks. The bright smile on her face has slipped away, replaced with something carefully neutral. “Are you… is everything okay?”

_He's dead _, Tifa doesn't say, _he's dead and I left him there, I left them all there to die. I didn't even go back to bury them.___

__Instead, she pauses a long, miserable moment, trying to think past Aerith's obvious worry and her own racing heart. Finally, she says, “I have something I have to tell you.”_ _

**Author's Note:**

> ...And then they team up and they all save the world together and _nobody dies_.


End file.
